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Friday, May 11, 2007

Zero's & One's

0's & 1's - for some this might look as a familiar title, for some its strange.

Yes today, I decided to write up what that actually surrounds us. In a warm up to this post, I asked few of my friends and colleagues as what surrounds them? One said "people", one said "system", one said "Nothing" :) and even one said, "anna... Heavy lunch... Thookam na...". So people have different view to it. Even some strange on me, when I asked them this question. But my view was different. I realize and see 0's and 1's surrounding us. My ethereal tracker said 95 packets crossed in and out of my Ethernet with my system in idle state. So everything are composed of 0's & 1's. For every Phone call we receive, Every mail we do, every song we listen its composed of 0's & 1's. So we haven't realized the importance of them. Now the question is are there sufficient 0's & 1's to satisfy our need? The present says yes, but the future?

Let me take up one small area the amount of 0's & 1's we consume daily. On an average a Software Engineer nerd, would go about consuming the following ways. So, I consider me as a test subject. I send up to 5-10 personal emails a day, it reaches around 30 recipients. I randomly chose a mail and found it had 382 characters, so its totally 8(mails) * 30(recipients) * 382(char) = 91680(chars). So its almost 91kb of data. Some increase exponentially as mail threads increase. I can recollect my class discussions going up to 80-90 replies. I atleast post a blog weekly. I get news alerts, my rss feeds, orkut scraps/communities Chat conversations I make, I lines of code (obviously less) and many more. So on an average an individual consumes/produces around 10-15mb of digital data. Now consider the average number of internet users. Billions! So think of the Digital data thats produces every second, its stagerring. Will there be resources to sustain it. We hope we have.

Now what if these resources get depleted one day! Is "The Matrix" a reality. yes of course, if we move at this pace. We might be ruled by others. Just because data and computation has increased around us. Research say, the average temperature would increase by 10 degree by 2080, some large ice caps melt and increase sea level. Where are we heading too?

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Good one dude..Once in some seminar the person asked the question like "What is India's contribution to the today's software World?" He said the answer was Zero..The crowd became enigmatic..What Zero? He told "Yeah the value "0", So, he said our share is 50% of the total data, coz it consist of 0's n 1's only".